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Soft as Granite

The trails around Prescott, AZ, proved to be a great place to break in the new dog, who is still unnamed. The Prescott area highlights granite gargoyles and balanced rocks. Then the granite crumbles into dry washes and trails. This goes against the normal image of 'hard as granite.' Granite, in a state of nature, seldom has the triple A hardness and denseness needed for the counter-tops of Alan Greenspan's McMansions and Garage Mahals. In fact, granite is usually found in a sub-prime state. 

After the recent housing boom, there must be craters in Vermont or Italy so huge that they perturb the rotational mechanics of the spinning globe. Failed politicians looking for a second career would do well to consider raising the general level of awareness of the dire threat of Global Tilting or Wobbling. 


It is no small miracle to see one of my theories actually work. I chose my second dog to be as different from my first dog as possible. I didn't want the specialness of the second dog to be destroyed by comparing it to the first. While hiking and biking with the new dog in these granite gargoyles near Prescott, this actually happened. 

I'm doing a pretty good job of applying the same principle to Prescott, one of the southwestern retirement boom towns that you would hate if you compared it to its golden age before "discovery" and californication! Fortunately I never knew Prescott in its golden age. I would rather dwell on the fact that some things in this world take a long time to decay; and they decay not into ugliness and mediocrity, but into:


Comments

I know the granite gargoyles of which you speak, and the good old pre-ruination days of Prescott. I bible camped above the little Rockwellian town as a youngster every summer. I don't remember learning much about the bible, but will always remember climbing around on off white boulders of granite... with their rough surfaces that allowed unlimited traction and the sweet Christmas scent of Ponderosa Pines wafting in the rarified air.
mark
Lucky you! I can just imagine Prescott in the old days: unbeatable Arizona climate and scenery, without the manSwarm, traffic, and McMansion clutter.

Granite really is a grippy surface, isn't it? But I appreciated it more as alluvial debris, as I watched my new dog running in it. Dogs have pads, not hooves. They love that loose stuff.